Coordinating intercollegiate speech and debate organizations and helping programs across the country.

Thanks for visiting the COFO website. We are an organization consisting of leaders from various intercollegiate national speech and debate tournaments, such as the AFA-NIET, Phi Rho Pi, and many more.

On the site, you can find out what colleges and universities have speech and debate programs – there are more than 600 different colleges and universities that compete in at least one different kind of speech or debate activity.

The COFO website hosts the national tournament calendar, which is the list of different national tournaments hosted by a variety of different organizations.

We also host a calendar of different college and university tournaments – each year typically includes more than 300 tournaments in a variety of different speech and debate formats. Tournament directors can add their own tournaments to the calendar, which will be published after review.

The 2022-2023 school year will feature a mix of online and in-person tournaments. When submitting tournaments, tournament directors can enter their tournament as being online or in person. For those unsure at this point, just enter the tournament — we’ll change it later as necessary.

Update (September 7, 2022): The COFO website is now being brought under the administration of the American Forensic Association (hence, the new domain). The old domain name will point to the new domain for a while. There will also be some housekeeping done in terms of layout and design (changing to the block editor, possibly a new theme, etc.). 

The 2022-2023 calendar is being updated regularly (as of August 26, most tournaments that I (Michael) am aware of have been entered.) Eventually, the 2021-2022 tournaments will be entered for the benefit of the historical record and so research will be able to include 2021-2022 data. In-person tournaments will likely default to 2019-2020 models; online tournaments will likely use some form of the 2020-2021 or 2021-2022 models. 

To find out more about the Council of Forensic Organizations, contact:

  • Dave Gaer, David.C.Gaer at lodestar.edu, COFO President
  • Michael Dreher, michael.dreher at gcsu.edu, COFO Webmaster/Secretary